Jeff Waugh is a prominent advocate worldwide of the open source ecosystem. In his latest article, he talks about the continued evolution of WordPress in a “new era”, which is mostly stuff my audience should know about. But it’s good to see it from a relative outsider’s perspective.
It won’t happen overnight, but WP-API will dramatically reduce the amount of active PHP code in WordPress, starting with the admin back-end. It will become a JavaScript app that talks to the WP-API sooner than anyone suspects.
Front-end (read: theme) development will change at a slower pace, because rendering HTML on the server side is still the right thing to do for performance and search. But themers will have the option to ditch the traditional loop for an internal, non-remoting version of the WP-API.
There’ll be some mostly-dead code maintained for backwards compatibility (because that’s how the dev team rolls), but on the whole, the PHP side of WordPress will be a lean, mean, API-hosting machine.
Which means there’s going to be even more JavaScript involved. Reckon that’s going to be built the same way as today? Nuh-uh. One taste of React in front of WP-API, and I reckon the jQuery and Backbone era will be finished.
In WordPress itself, most of this will affect how the admin back-end is built, but we’ll also see some great WordPress-as-application examples in the near future. Think Parse-style app development, but with WordPress as the Open Source, self-hosted, user-controlled API services layer behind the scenes.
This should sound familiar to you guys that read my post on the WP API, but Jeff Waugh has the advantage that he sparks conversations — and brings in the haters — on Hacker News. It’s worth a read for sure.
